Mark is absolutely right. You want multiples of 3 for your memory. But beware, the 8GB dimms are still somewhat outrageously priced. Luckily, with a 2 socket motherboard, you can do 3 on one CPU and 3 on the other at 1333 mhz (also pretty expensive, if you can find them. Dell might be harder than others to obtain these)
So 6x2 = 12GB ram at 1333 mhz or 6x4 = 24GB ram at 1333 mhz or 12x2 = 24GB ram at 1033 mhz or 12x4 = 48GB ram at 1033 mhz I wouldn't go with 18 dimms at 800 mhz if you want the best memory performance. If you can find support 1333 mhz from dell, that'll give you your best memory bandwidth, if not, go with 12 dimms at 1033 which are plentiful. If you are really only going with a single socket motherboard, you're stuck with 4GB to get the amount of memory that you want. 3x4GB at 1333 or 6x4 GB at 1033. You should take a look at Super Micro too. We're very happy with their products. Also, have you consider a self-contained cluster filesystem like gluster running on each of the nodes? If you already have a SAN, then fine, but you can get a lot of bandwidth out of Gluster and inherent sharing. 10G is a good complement to this as is a single Infiniband switch which you could run your network and your data. and get 40gbit/sec between nodes. (that's a lot more than your SAN bandwidth for about the same price, and good for a small cluster) _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
